I wondered whether I should take her to the doctor, but it was six twenty and the office would be closed. If I took her to the ER, it would be at least an hour in the car that she could be resting in bed. I called her pediatrician and left word for the on-call doctor. I managed to get her to down the whole glass of warm milk, but she wouldn’t eat anything, so I carried her to bed, took off her clothes and put on her warmest pajamas.
“We’re going to cook that fever out of you,” I told her with a smile. “I’ll give you an extra blanket to keep you warm. By the time you wake up, you’ll be toasty warm and the fever will be gone – poof into the night.” I promised, waving my arm as if to banish it.
“Poof,” she rasped, trying to smile.
I sat with her for a while, brushing her wet curls from her forehead and wondering just how sick she was. In all the time she had been with me, she’d never had an ear infection or anything worse than a cold. I had to think back to my own childhood to try to resurrect what to do. I remember my mother smearing Vicks on my chest when I had a cold. Once I had strep throat and had to take antibiotics and stay home for a week. She helped me cut out paper dolls and played kids’ board games with me, and gave me as much ice cream as I wanted.
I went back to the kitchen and microwaved the rest of the macaroni and cheese for myself, thinking idly that what Dawn had was contagious and it probably wasn’t a good idea, but feeling too lazy to make anything else for myself. When the doctor called back at eight, I was still at the kitchen table, staring into space. She told me that she’d want to culture Dawn’s throat for strep, but that it could wait until the morning. She told me to call her in the morning and report on her fever an hour after she awoke. I wondered if I had any ice cream in the house.
I was in the shower at ten that night when Dawn woke up the first time. Rather than use her throat to call me, she got up and banged on the shower door. Her hand was at her throat. “Hurts,” she whispered. I asked if she wanted more warm milk. She shook her head and started to cry. I put my towel around her and carried her back to her bed. “Gotta keep you warm,” I said as I tucked her back in. “And I need to get dry.” I dried myself in front of her, wondering what I could do to lessen her pain. I had no sore throat medicine. I couldn’t drive to a pharmacy and leave her here alone.
“I’ve got just the thing,” I touted, “a very special thing for sore throats.” I ground up an aspirin in a glass, mixed in lemon juice and drowned it in honey until I had a gooey sweet mixture, all the while feeling a bit frantic. What did I know about taking care of a sick child? But I remembered my mother having made this for me when I’d had a sore throat as a child.
She was both crying and trying not to at the same time when I returned to her room with the gooey stuff. “Hurts too much to cry?” I asked. She nodded. “I know what you mean.” I held out a spoonful of my concoction. “Magic honey goo for a sore throat,” I told her. She opened her mouth willingly and I slipped in the first spoonful.
“Try to swallow it slowly; let it just melt down that throat.” She winced but swallowed and opened her mouth again, like a baby bird. It felt like an hour passed before I could get the whole cup into her, but she took every spoonful, lay down again and fell asleep almost immediately.
It was eleven before I dragged myself into bed. All my insecure voices clammered. I need to be vigilant for her; I need to sleep; I need to fill my house with the usual childhood medicines so I don’t find myself alone and in need like this again. No wonder people pair up before having children – someone has to stay home with the child while the other goes to the pharmacy. For the first time since we got home, I thought of Patty. Were they all sick too? I’d call her in the morning.
I picked up a book of Mary Oliver’s poetry, comforting myself with her images. I’d always wanted to illustrate one of her books. I awoke by Dawn pulling on my arm. “Do you need some more magic goo?” She just shook her head and crawled into bed with me. Good, I thought, now I’ll know how she is. And we both fell asleep.
When I next awoke, the sky was gray with early morning and Dawn was still asleep, curled against my left side like a large cat. Without moving my body, I felt her forehead, which seemed normal, and then my own, which felt a little cooler than hers. Don’t kid yourself, I reminded myself; temperature is always lowest early in the morning.
We lay in place like that for another hour or so, while I dozed and let my mind wander. When I was Dawn’s age and Patty was a year younger, she sometimes crept into bed with me, often after I’d gone to sleep. I’d wake up with a warm weight in my bed, breathing on my shoulder. I knew our mother thought it was important for each of us to be in our own beds, but I liked how it felt to wake up with her. I loved having a sister.
I watched the sky turn gradually blue, and the field behind our house turn yellow with the rising sun. I wanted to get up but I wanted also to preserve this moment with Dawn at my side.
By the time Dawn awoke, I had already in my mind called the doctor and planned what to get for the house on our way back from the office. As I’d predicted, her fever reawakened soon after she did, and we went to the doctor’s office for her to swab a culture. “It’s so likely to be strep that I’m going to give you the prescription now,” she told me. “Keep her away from other children until we know on Monday.” I felt a new confidence with the prescription in hand; help was on the way, and I swooped up a variety of children’s cold and sore throat medications on my way out of the pharmacy.
Dawn was an easy patient. She slept much of that Friday, woke long enough to take more medication and drink warm milk with honey or honey-goo, as she had taken to calling it. I read to her. While she slept, I sketched for the book I was working on. I decided to wait until Sunday before calling Patty. By then, Dawn still had a fever, though it was lower and her throat still hurt; but we had a treatment plan in place and we were both pretty relaxed. She was in bed but looking at books when I went into the other room to call Patty.
This time she answered on the second ring with a civil hello.
“How are you all? I hope better.”
“Ian is better, but Sandra and Doug both have a bad sore throat and a fever.” She sounded reluctant to tell me.
“I’m sorry to hear it. Dawn has the same thing, and her doctor thinks it’s strep. She told me to keep her away from other children until we know for sure.”
“Yuck. I was hoping it wouldn’t be that.”
I told Patty I thought it would be best for everyone if I kept Dawn with me until she recovered. I kept my voice down because sound carries throughout my little house.
“You’re probably right. Let’s check in with each other mid-week.” I felt a huge relief.
“How are you feeling?”
“Awful,” she confessed and then hung up.
Dawn looked up expectantly when I came back into her room. She has a sense for what goes on.
“You don’t have to go back to Aunt Patty’s today,” I told her. “Not ’til you get better.” I could have sworn I saw a sly smile on her face as she looked back down at her book.
5
About six years ago, when I was still visiting my dad in Sacramento on Sundays, he recommended a family lawyer to me. We were in the midst of brunch, and I was just forking a piece of eggs benedict into my mouth when he made that statement, totally out of any context. I remember the eggs because I paused at what a bizarre, random comment he had just made, and some eggy hollandaise dribbled onto my shirt. It must have been when I was still pregnant; I was eating heartily and I stopped making those visits soon after Dawn was born. Why did you say that, Dad? He must have seen the question on my face.
“Just in case,” he’d said elliptically, refusing to elaborate.
That was some time after he’d closed his office in Nevada City and retreated to a condo in Sacramento with his girlfriend, whom he later married. His established practice in to
wn had dried up after word got out that he’d taken up with a local waitress twenty years his junior soon after Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I can’t remember whether he was still on contract then with the nine-man firm that did personal injury, estate planning and family law or whether he had retired. He hadn’t exactly thrived in Sacramento, but at one time his was the go-to solo practice in Nevada City for everyone’s legal problems. When I worked for him that summer in high school, it was obvious from the phone calls and the clients I greeted that he was in demand and respected.
If he were still alive, I would have asked him how to end Patty’s guardianship. The irony is that he died of a stroke while I was still in the hospital and Mom remains alive to this day. Patty didn’t even tell me at the time because it could have added to my depression, and on this point I can’t disagree. I missed his memorial service and the wake at Patty’s home. If he were here, I think he’d still give me advice, even though Patty is my opponent.
I comfort myself to think that he lived long enough to meet Dawn, while she was still a swaddled infant. His face cracked wide open and his gray eyes welled. Can I hold her? He asked, and then expertly laid his large left hand under her head, kissed her gently on her forehead and cradled her. Red hair -- did you expect that? People will ask you who the father is. I’d told him I could handle that.
His meeting Dawn was such a contrast to Mom’s, but I need to stop thinking of her as having intention.
It’s so odd that I still remember the name of the lawyer Dad gave me: Herb Well (a better name for a doctor than a lawyer, but not a bad name to announce in court).
Some people take pleasure in the wellbeing of others, and encourage others when they need it. Patty was not among them – even though she had been in my early days with Dawn. When I called her on Wednesday to report that Dawn was well, the first thing she told me was that both her children were down with strep throat. When I asked how she and Doug were feeling, all she said was ‘weary’. I suggested that I keep Dawn with me through the following weekend, and she agreed. I tried to wish her children a speedy recovery, but she just hung up.
On Sunday, I watched Dawn pick out the clothes to wear when she returned to Patty’s house. She chose a blue skirt and matching sweater, not her usual jeans or bright colors. She objected when I tousled her hair. “Mama, don’t mess it. Aunt Patty likes it combed neatly.” Combing Dawn’s fine, curly, tangled hair is a tortuous process, painful for her and me both. I keep her hair short, and usually brush it straight when it is wet and then fluff it with my fingers and let it dry that way. It worked for us but apparently not for Aunt Patty. I asked if she wanted me to wet her hair, but she said no, just comb it through. I did it carefully, wondering about this preparation ritual, but she winced at each stroke. When I finished, she looked at herself in the mirror and patted down her errant fluffs.
When I returned Dawn to Roseville at the usual time, everyone in the family had recovered. Doug gave me a hug when he answered the door, and Ian came running out to greet Dawn. He had a new game he wanted to show her, and they ran hand in hand to his room. Patty emerged with her arm over Sandra’s shoulder. As usual these days, Sandra gave me a skeptical look, and just mumbled when I told her I was glad she was feeling well again. As if on cue, Doug told Sandra he needed her help with something in the other room, leaving me to face Patty alone.
“You’ve had her a week and two weekends in a row now,” she announced as if she were an accountant.
“Yes, and it felt good, even though she was sick part of the time. I…”
“Don’t come next weekend.”
I found myself stammering. I always had Dawn on weekends.
“Not the next one,” and she moved to hustle me out the door.
I called her back from the road; I couldn’t quite believe what she had told me, and I felt my anger rising. Patty answered on the first ring, obviously not surprised by my call, and in her calm voice explained that they were having a birthday party for Ian the next weekend and wanted Dawn to be part of it.
“When is the party? I’ll bring her back for it.”
“No. Dawn is part of this family and hasn’t been here for a while. We all miss her.”
“And I’m not part of this family?”
“Yes, of course you are, but it would be difficult the way you’ve been lately.” All this she said in the voice of an old schoolteacher talking to a delinquent student.
“When can I pick her up?”
“You had her for the equivalent of two weekends, so you can skip this one and pick her up the following Friday.”
“Patty, I don’t play games with your children, so –”
“This is not a game, Karen.”
The name Herb Well came back to me before I even got back home. I felt I owed it to Dad to contact him if he was still in practice. When I looked him up on my computer, the state bar website showed him as having his own office on York Street, near the courthouse, on the same block where my Dad had had his office years ago. Herb Well had a low bar number, under 50,000. He must be old. Dad’s was 47,973. Odd, the random details I picked up while working for him so many years ago.
I called Herb Well’s office the next day and was unsettled that he answered the phone himself, “Well here.” An invitation to a joke, but I wasn’t up to it. He explained, too self-consciously, that his secretary had just stepped out for an errand. He gave me an appointment the next day.
His office was cozy and old-fashioned, like Dad’s had been, with his name painted in black gothic letters on the glass of the door to the old house facing the courthouse. He even had an old oak secretary desk behind his chair, like Dad’s, and an oak table facing the client chairs. He did in fact have a secretary, and she opened the door to his office for me. Herb Well himself did not fill the image I had been creating. He looked maybe seventy, with bushy gray hair pulled back into a loose ponytail at the nape of his neck. He had attempted to tuck it into the collar of his shirt, but it escaped like hay stuffed into a shirt.
“Hello, Karen,” he said as he shook my hand. I didn’t want him to call me by my first name. “What brings you to see a lawyer?” It came out as ‘law-yer’. I found myself wanting to see someone who called himself an attorney.
We spent more than an hour together, with his taking my family history, my rendition of my hospitalization and recovery, the frequency of my visits with Dawn, her health, her sperm donor, my occupation and income. He told me his granddaughter had one of my books and when he told me the title, I believed him. After I regurgitated all this information, he described the procedure for terminating a guardianship. He would file a petition based on my narrative as to why Dawn no longer needs a guardian other than me, deliver it to Patty so that she could respond, and the court would hold a hearing. They may also do an evaluation and report to the court, he told me.
I asked what it would cost. Fifteen hundred dollars, if it’s not complicated. I blanched at what was a big chunk of one of my book illustration fees. To have to pay legal fees to get my daughter back was beyond my reckoning. I had eighty-two thousand dollars in the bank, all of my inheritance from my Dad and some interest on it, but I had never touched it. It was my reserve for Dawn’s future education.
“I’ve actually given you a discount,” he explained, “since you are Neville Haskins’ daughter. Legal fees are expensive.” He seemed to read my face. “I can do you one better. I remember from years ago that you know how to fill out legal forms, and you certainly know how to write. I could show you what you need to file and help you with the papers, and you could handle it yourself. That would only cost you the filing fees, a few hundred dollars.”
I found myself thanking him profusely and insincerely. I insisted on writing him a check for his time. I told him I would call him back if I couldn’t talk Patty into consenting.
After getting into my car, I sagged into the seat. Meeting wit
h an attorney was something I never thought I’d need to do. As I heard the slight grind in the starter I realized I’d rather spend the money to get my car repaired than to have to file a lawsuit against my own sister. And there was no way on this earth that I would do it myself.
Only after I was nearly home did I realize that in his thorough questioning he had failed to discover that Dawn has Patty’s genes, not mine. To be fair, I had not volunteered this far-from-obvious detail. Far more important, as I learned later, he neglected to tell me of an important deadline I nearly missed.
It was many weeks later before I finally brought myself to the point of hiring an attorney to get my daughter back. I skipped the weekend as Patty had demanded, brought Ian a birthday present the following weekend, and then we fell back into our usual weekly pattern until the beginning of that summer.
My birthday fell on the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend, so Patty ‘allowed’ me the long weekend and extra day with Dawn. I suspected this ‘gift’ was the result of her realizing she had blown it by cutting me out of Ian’s birthday.
6
I wake up early on Friday, the day I pick up Dawn for my weekend with her. The birds wake me while the sky is still bone-gray, singing at each other rather than the call and response they do later in the day. This is a contest for who has the biggest bird lungs. This is the tuning up for the day, no harmony intended, like an orchestra warming up before the concert begins. They fall silent as the sky takes on a hint of pale yellow, before it turns blue. I get up around six, still in the birds’ silent interval.
Today begins my birthday weekend. The refrigerator is full of berries, Dawn’s favorite fruit. I shopped yesterday and bought blueberries, raspberries and strawberries, which I mixed together with bits of mint from our garden. She and I can eat berry salad until we are bloated. I have a little for breakfast on my oat flakes and then drive down the hill to Roseville.
Raising Dawn Page 4